“It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Students of history may already realize those are not my words, nor those of any contemporary witness to current events. They are words written almost 75 years ago by a thirteen year old girl and arguably one of the best known victims of the holocaust, Anne Frank.

Trodding the tear soaked earth at Auschwitz a couple of summers ago, it was hard to fathom the depth of cruelty, the brutal ugliness of what had happened there and the legacy of misery that can never be removed from the record of our species. Damnable as that legacy is, Anne Frank also wrote, “I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.”

It is interesting that Frank focused on beauty as opposed to something more obviously pragmatic at the time, like resisting the Nazi occupiers, winning the war, or bringing perpetrators to justice.

Why beauty?

Perhaps because she knew, deep down, beauty saves.

Saves? Now there’s a loaded word. What do I mean by save, you may wondering? Well, I’m not talking about attaining or being granted life after death or egoic detachment resulting in a state of perpetual bliss. No. Rather, I’m referring to a profound experience or awareness of what the contemporary philosopher Jacob Needleman calls, “the deeper meaning of human equality.” Needleman contends, “Deep down in the human essence, we all are part of some common greatness.”

A common greatness, Needleman says, “…we need to respect in each other and rediscover in ourselves.” And a common greatness, I might add, for which our various conceptualizations throughout human history have proven frustratingly inadequate. Nonetheless, beauty saves by raising our awareness of, reconnecting us to, and deepening our faith in, this common greatness of which we are a part.

And what of beauty? Another loaded word. What is beautiful? Are we talking about people, nature, objects, actions? In short, yes. For beauty may be expressed through any of these. But beauty here does not mean aesthetically pleasing, but deeply genuine.

For the natural world around us this is easy…it comes, well, naturally. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.” Beauty, or deep genuineness is also, in part, why an original or “antique” object is generally more admired than a copy or reproduction, no matter how good the imitation. But alas, for people, it’s a little more complicated. For unlike plants and animals or even objects, we are often unsure of who we are and consequently, our place in the universe.

A confusion Jacob Needleman suggests is manifest in our contemporary emphasis on individualism over individuality, which he notes are very different. “Individualism and individuality”, he says, “have to be separated. Individualism can take a turn where it's a kind of egoistic, selfish thing: Me, me, me, me, and what I want and what I care, what I think and what I like….We need to have the liberty to express all that, but a real [genuine] individual is a different thing…To be truly one's self is to be in contact with [the] great self within, [the] divinity within.” “And the paradox of true individuality”, Needleman further notes, “is that the more you are in touch with what all human beings have in common …, the more you are uniquely what you, yourself, are.”

Beauty as deep genuineness, then, is an expression of individuality. That unique self which emerges from the ground of being common to all.

This seems, in part, to be what Norbert Capek sought to ritualize, which is to say, focus on or elevate, through flower communion. Which he described as, “A new experiment in symbolizing our liberty and unity (originally brotherhood)...in which participants confess that we accept each other as brothers and sisters without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody as our friend who...wants to be good.”

And as Capek’s wife, Maja, herself a minister, observed, “No two flowers are alike, no two people are alike; yet each has a contribution to make; each would help to make this world as beautiful as a colorful bouquet.”

A world as beautiful as a colorful bouquet.

One need only pick up a history book or peruse the day’s headlines to realize this is not a vision shared by everyone, now or in the past. Indeed, the Nazi occupiers of Capek’s homeland of Czechoslovakia deemed this vision and Capek himself so great a threat that in 1941 Capek’s apartment was raided by the Gestapo. Arrested and found “too dangerous to be allowed to live” Capek was sent to Dachau.

At Dachau, where the ugliness of the racist, xenophobic, hate-filled ideology of Nazism found expression in horrific, concrete practice, Capek continued the spirit of flower communion, living life as an expression of his unique beauty through writing, preaching and consoling his fellow prisoners. Beauty which emerged from sustained contact with the ground of being common to us all.

As to whether or not beauty saves, survivors of the camp later testified Capek could not have been sent to a place where he was more needed. Capek himself did not survive. In October 1942 he was sent to the gas chamber.

Capek may not have survived the war, but he, like Anne Frank, left us words which leave no doubt he was indeed saved,

“It is worthwhile to live and fight courageously for sacred ideals. Oh blow ye evil winds into my body’s fire; my soul you’ll never unravel. Even though disappointed a thousand times or fallen in the fight and everything would worthless seem, I have lived amidst eternity. Be grateful, my soul, My life was worth living.” He who was pressed from all sides but remained victorious in spirit is welcomed into the choir of heroes. He who overcame the fetters giving wing to the mind is entering into the golden age of the victorious.”

Let us look then to beauty, always, but especially when the world is most brutal, as it often is these days, when ugliness mocks and tempts us to deny who we are, unique individuals bound in a common greatness. As a colorful bouquet. May it be so.